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whorgoaparl

XFree86 Politics & Keith Packard

Submitted by sbutle on Fri, 2003-03-21 06:45. FreeDesktop.org

PCLinuxOnline is reporting that Keith Parkard wants to fork the XFree86 effort and has subsequently been removed from the XFree86 core team. The issue in general. and if GNOME should send out a statement supporting Keith, is currently being discussed by various GNOME community members on the GNOME Foundation mailing list. The issue is also being discussed on slashdot.

What fork?

Submitted by fudje on Fri, 2003-03-21 23:18.

I have read through a fair amount of the mailing list stuff around this (pipermail on xfree86.org needs some fscking cleaning up, I must say), and have seen no evidence of Keith wanting to fork.

However, to sum up peoples ideas and place my own opinion should such a thing happen (I haven't posted to any mailing lists because A. I don't have time for mailing lists right now, and B. I'm not sure if I should be stating my opinion to official lines right now):

X is still a standard. If anyone does fork, the standard should be maintained and therefore compatability
Keith does not have an unbased argument with the XFree86 BOD.
A lot of GNOME and KDE development is greatly connected with improvements that Keith is largely responsible for

Basically, a fork doesn't look likely, but if one should occur, then I dare say that Keith Packard would be subject to quite a lot of support. I suspect that if such a fork did occur, then he XFree86 project may well become like a relic of things past (especially if coding practices and quality of source is improved in the "fork"; And also modularity et c. � this in particularly is really wrong in XFree86. Whole source tree to compile one driver? Wake up! Move on...)

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